In this post I follow a convention of including – wherever possible – images of key people cited as a reminder that although ideas are memetic and not particular to people, if we are to recognise acts of authorship it is useful to highlight that they are particular people with bodies. (Conventional citation hides gender even) bodies that provide the foundation for their thought. I think it’s important to somehow root their ideas in their bodies or at least try to make clear that these ideas aren’t abstract things floating around a library but were born of particular bodies.

The embarrassing fact is, as you will see, that the citations are almost entirely white men. Whose fault is this – the library’s? the academy’s? the discipline’s? mine? Well I am part of all of these (except the library) to varying degrees so it is my responsibility. This is not uncommon (the norm I think) but is still something to take responsibility for. I highly recommend reading Sarah Ahmed’s post about white men (for her current book she has a policy of not citing any white men).

So making visible this unsurprising bias is a small first step but the real business is to read more widely, something that probably requires the kind of firm policy that Ahmed is employing since every bookshelf is a sausagefest. So I wonder whether I should post this at all. I think there is something in it but it is undermined by an increasing sense of blinkered parochialism.

We are hard-wired to be disgusted by secretions, decay and disease. Although Britain is somewhat lax on the cleanliness ‘front’, it’s generally assumed now that scientific advances have shown us the importance of regular washing for our biological health.

It’s not really news to point out that award winning TV show The Big Bang Theory is a load of sexist shit. I have to admit however that I do sometimes watch it.

Since it started in 2007, a running joke has been that one of the main characters Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) has a really needy/ controlling mother, that we never see her just hear her (Carol Ann Susi) shouting from elsewhere in their shared house.

There’s a good tradition of unseen sit com characters but I think the joke here works because (we are told) that Mrs Wolowitz is immensely overweight and hirsute – a ‘horror’ hard to cast and only enhanced by leaving it in our imagination.

Mrs Wolowitz also sometimes needs to be cared for by her son and I suspect this is another image that mainstream TV wants to hide from us. I think we don’t like generally to see people that are overweight or sick.

Open House is a short speech and movement score for 10-60 people. Using verbatim text from the national parliament it makes a game of the metaphors of political debates. If political speech is used to choreograph citizens, can that state-wide choreography be applied to a small crowd? And how might that crowd start to take control?